Modern Quilts With A Twist

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Monthly Archives: July 2014

I’ve been WAITING to tell about my Zippy Star quilt, which appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited, and here it is!

Zippy Star Quilt and Pillow as shown in Modern Quilts Unlimited, Summer 2014

Didn’t they do a great job of the “glamor shot”? I love the setting

And the magazine has clear instructions with lots of helpful pictures. OK, I wrote the instructions and their staff improved on my pictures, so both are pretty good! There’s a pillow cover to go with the quilt, just for fun.

This is one of several pages of instructions

The Michael Miller company worked with me to choose fabric for the quilt and I’m very pleased with how it came out. The central square fabric is called “Tara’s Fireworks” and is a print made from a quilt one of MM’s employees created with their Cotton Couture solids. So of course the star points made from Cotton Couture solids match perfectly!

Some of the beautiful Michael Miller fabrics

The quilt is fairly small (48 x 58) so I quilted it on my home machine. This was such fun and I’m so pleased with how it is featured in the magazine!

Here’s the magazine cover. It should be at Barnes & Noble and Joann’s soon!

I really enjoyed the Vermont Quilt Festival in Burlington the end of June. I expected a traditional quilt show, and there were some traditional quilts, but there were many modern quilts as well. Here are 10 of my favorites for various reasons. That fantastic quilting on the first one was done by Carrie Zizza of Zizza Machine Quilting (http://www.itsazizza.com/).

Woo! It’s been an exciting week!
My entry in the Quilt Alliance “Inspired By” Challenge won 3rd place! Here’s a picture of it, and below that is a link that will take you to a short video showing all the winners! I am SO excited!

Whirlwind, my 2015 Quilt Alliance challenge quilt

And HERE is a link that will show you all the winners in a very short youtube video.
The quilt will now tour with the other entries and will be auctioned on Ebay next fall to benefit the Quilt Alliance.

And here’s a picture of the second excitement: [photo] I finally finished my quilt for the Michael Miller challenge. It’s a packet of flower seeds with the new scanning code I now see on items at the nursery, composed of multiple colored triangles. I don’t think you can scan mine; I designed it based on the code but didn’t copy exactly.

Packet of Posy Seeds

Finally, I had a “very significant birthday” and my husband gave me a new Bernina

Bernina 550 QE

for the occasion! I’ll be reviewing it after I’ve used it for a while. For now I’m just enjoying trying out all the features!
So, as they used to say on the radio, listen in next week…I’ll have pictures from the Vermont Quilt Festival, which was really good.

Of all the things people think they need help with, color is mentioned most often. Indeed, color can be complicated if you want to make it that way, but my preference is to make it simple. So here goes…

Example 1: Purple Quilt

A good starting place is your favorite color. You don’t have to think too much about what that is. So start with your favorite color and then add colors that you like to see with it. Never mind that stuff about analogous color schemes being restful and complementary color schemes being lively. Yes, they are true, but if you do it that way you’re likely over-thinking it. If YOU like the color scheme, then go for it! I love purple, so that’s what I chose for this first example. I like gold with it, and the thought process was “I like gold with it so I’ll use it” rather than, “Gold is complementary to purple so I’ll use it.” However, if knowing it’s complementary helps you, by all means use that framework. I chose a grey background fabric because grey is “good this year”, as my Mother would have put it.

But let’s assume you want a color scheme kind of worked out in advance. A common piece of advice is to pick a print as your feature fabric and then choose your coordinates from the colors in the feature print. That works fine, but it assumes you want a multi-color print as the focal point of your quilt.

One of thousands of color schemes all ready to use at Design-Seeds.com

There are lots of other ways that work at least as well. Color schemes are everywhere you look, and they’ve already been worked out by many design experts, from Mother Nature to New York City advertising specialists. Flip through a favorite magazine and choose an ad with colors that appeal to you. Take a snapshot of something pretty and use the colors you see there. Go to design-seeds.com to view thousands of color combinations. You can subscribe to a free daily e-mail featuring some of them. Start a Pinterest board where you save color combinations that appeal to you. Above all, have confidence in your own judgment: If YOU like it, that’s good enough!

Color scheme is from a visit to southern New Mexico

Now, go practice by finding some color schemes you like and designing quilts with them. As always, designing on paper counts! And if this wasn’t enough information about color to suit you, don’t worry–I’ll be saying lots more later!